Location: Tomball, TX
Cloud cover: none
Transparency: clear
Seeing: poor (2/5)
Darkness: city sky glow, no moon
Limiting Magnitude: n/a
Wind: mild/none
Humidity: 55% early up to 75% later
Temperature: upper-40’s
Start Time: 7:30 pm CST
End Time: 10:30 pm CST
OTA: 8″ SC
Didn’t learn star names in Cassiopeia, but looked them up on the laptop. Found a site that called Alpha Cas by the name Shedir, but NexStar didn’t list that name. Delta Cas was listed as Ruchbah, which was easily found. I aligned with Ruchbah, Sirius, and Capella, and the goto performed quite well all night.
Took significantly longer to find Ceres tonight than last night, even though tonight I had the laptop with SNP. There were several relatively bright stars nearby, widely dispersed with no obvious pattern. Another problem is conflicting orbital data; one set matched last night’s observations, while the other set matched tonight’s. Ugh. Anyway, Ceres sat at the 90 angle of a bright triangle. Also tried finding last night’s location, but some of the faint stars in that pattern were not visible.
Eunomia didn’t take too long to find. It sat between a boat-like squashed trapezoid of four stars and a narrow wedge of five dimmer stars.
Used NexStar’s tour function; it suggested Eta Cassiopeia and M103. The double star Eta Cas was very nice; the primary seemed white while red companion showed better color in the 25mm ep than the 10mm.
The open cluster M103 was not as bright as I expected. The narrow field easily fit in the 25mm view.
The field of view estimates in SNP seem a bit wide. The 32mm’s actual field was about the same size as SNP’s estimate of the 25mm field. Need to revisit that some time.
